At PayHOA, our team is constantly working with HOAs across the country to help find solutions to their unique challenges. More often than not, those custom solutions become a standard part of our platform, so when you encounter the same problem, a solution is right there waiting for you.
That takes a lot of work on our part. We go as long as we can without raising our prices, and when we do, we raise our price as little as possible. This lets us invest aggressively in building new tools, improving existing features, and delivering better customer support.
We've provided a list of ways we've improved our platform over the years. You can expect the same innovative evolution and personal service as always.
APRIL 2021
Lockbox
- Lockbox is a feature that helps eliminate receiving and processing paper checks from owners to your HOA.
- When Lockbox is enabled, we assign a P.O. Box for your community where all owner payments are mailed. The checks will show up in your ledger already categorized and broken down by payment.
- There is no fee to enroll in Lockbox. The only fee is a $1 charge for every check processed. The $1 fee is billed along with your subscription fees automatically.
- To enroll in Lockbox, go to Settings > Enroll in Lockbox.
Then select the bank account where you want Lockbox payments deposited.
That's it — you're done! We'll automatically update your mailed invoices to include a payment scan line and update the return slip to the correct P.O. Box.
Custom Request Forms
- The recent changes to Request Forms lets you customize existing Requests and create new types of requests for your community.
- To edit an existing Request, just click the gear icon next to the Request title.
Then click "Edit Form."
Here you can update the Request title, add or remove questions, re-order questions, and modify which questions are required.
You can also upload supplemental documents and/or add instructions for homeowners.
In addition to editing existing Requests, you can also create new Request types. Just go to Violations & Requests, then click "Add A New Request Form."
For each type of Request Form, you can edit who has permissions, who receives emails when comments are left, and whether or not the form is enabled.
You can now enable approvals for specific request types and select which users need to approve the request.
When a new request is created, that group of users will receive an email letting them know a new request needs to be approved.
They can easily approve, deny, or write a custom comment.
You can see the approval progress for all requests that have approvals enabled.
MARCH 2021
Transaction Ledger
- The transaction ledger can now be filtered by bank account.
- It will default to display "Unreviewed Transactions."
- You can still use the tabs at the top of the table to view "All Transactions," "Excluded," and "Reviewed."
- We also added "Book Balance (in PayHOA) and Bank Balance" to the bank account cards at the top of the page. This allows you to easily see if your accounts are in balance.
In-Line Editing
- Transactions can now be edited in-line to make it clearer which transaction you are modifying.
- We also improved the "Transfer" functionality to make it more explicit in selecting the "To" and "From" accounts.
Rules
- Rules can now be created to automatically categorize transactions based on the description, amount, and transaction type.
- Rules will retroactively categorize transactions that have not been marked "Reviewed."
- Rules can be created directly from a transaction or by clicking the new "Rules" button.
General Ledger Report
- The new General Ledger report shows how each balance for Assets, Liabilities, Income, and Expense categories are calculated.
- You can view transactions for a period of time or lifetime.
FEBRUARY 2021
Navigation
- We've updated the main navigation to make it easier to find what you're looking for.
- We broke the Communications tab into several sections and grouped the navigation items by category.
Reporting Dashboard
- We added reporting dashboards for Broadcast (texts and calls), Requests & Violations, and Mail Room (snail mail).
- These new reporting dashboards allow us to display more granular reporting around open rates, delivery status, etc.
- They also lay the groundwork for the next phase of this project, which includes new Violations & Requests workflows.
Email Enhancements
- We added rich text formatting, merge fields, reusable templates, and message preview to our emailing module.
- This allows you to create professional-looking emails without any HTML coding knowledge.
- We also updated the styles on our HTML emails to appear more subtle and modern.
Financial Reports
- We built a bank reconciliation process that lets you tie your transaction ledger back to your bank statement and save as a bank reconciliation report for that period.
We also built a budget performance report that shows your budget performance for the selected month and YTD in a single report.
DECEMBER 2020
New Settings For Violations and Requests
- You'll find a new "Settings" button in the header for Violations, Maintenance, Architectural, and General Requests.
By clicking Settings," you can designate which users in your account will receive emails when Requests are submitted and when comments are made on Violations or Requests.
If you don't select specific users in the new Settings section, PayHOA will continue to default to sending emails to everyone in your account that has admin-level permissions or read/write permissions to that module.
We also added a checkbox option when violations are created that lets you control whether or not admin-level users receive an email upon creation.
Each time a violation is created, you can click the checkbox "email admins" or leave it unchecked. This will determine whether or not your selected users (via Settings) or default users will receive an email when the violation is created.
Change of Ownership Functionality
- We added a new feature that allows you to "Change Ownership" in a unit.
- You can still move additional owners in and out of the unit, but a change in ownership allows us to provide an Ownership history for each unit that can be found on the Unit Detail page.
Change of Ownership will automatically move out the old owners and archive them in PayHOA, saving you the step of manually moving them out and archiving their user account.
We also added a few new options regarding the unit balance.
You can now select whether the unit balance should remain or be forgiven. If future charges should remain on the unit, if recurring invoices should remain on the unit, and if the outstanding invoices should be consolidated into a single invoice or remain as line items for the new owner.
NOVEMBER 2020 Updates
Late Fees
- Multiple late fees can now be assigned to a single invoice.
- Each late fee can be a percentage or flat amount, and the fee can be recurring or one-time.
- Interest-based late fees can also be configured as simple or compounding interest.
In addition, we added a Preferences section within Settings that allows you to decide if owners must pay late fees first, before being allowed to pay invoices.
Settings
- You now have the ability to turn modules on or off based on your community's needs.
- You can also control the emails your owners automatically receive with regard to invoices, payment reminders, automatic past due reminders, and monthly statements.
Recurring Invoices
- You can now set recurring invoice due dates to specific days, rather than a set number of days after the billing date.
Once a recurring template is created, you can now edit that template for all associated units in place.
By clicking "view details," you can also generate future cycles of the recurring invoice on demand. This is useful if you want owners to pay a full year or full quarter of dues in advance.
Transactions Page
- You can now create Journal Entries on the Transactions page.
- Journal Entry report is available in the Reports section.
We added a green "REVIEWED" checkbox next to each transaction. This allows PayHOA to populate a category based on historical selections, so you only need to mark the transaction as reviewed for it to show up in your financial reports.
PayHOA now supports Liability and Asset accounts. These accounts can be created by going to Budgets > Edit Categories > Asset or Liability tab.
Starting balances can be added and transactions can increase or decrease the values.
Reports
- In the year 2020, we added a dozen financial reports to the PayHOA platform.
- We standardized the PDF format so Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Treasurers can easily access the data
Budgets
- Budgeting data can now be copied from one year to the next by clicking the "Copy Revenue" and "Copy Expense" buttons within Manage Budget.